


lacuna

by Askance



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Experimental, F/M, No Plot/Plotless, Post-Canon, Pre-Treasure Island
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 18:54:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17330531
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Askance/pseuds/Askance
Summary: Madi loves him, and that is her misery. She hates him, too, and the two are at war without ceasing in her breast; the torment, now, after sixteen years together all told, is that it has all dulled, all settled out like water undisturbed.





	lacuna

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alethiometry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alethiometry/gifts).



> _“Of Silver we have heard no more. That formidable seafaring man with one leg has at last gone clean out of my life; but I daresay he met his old negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, I suppose, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small.”_
> 
> _Robert Louis Stevenson / Treasure Island_
> 
> * * *
> 
>  

They have not shared a bed in ten years, in part because he rarely comes to bed in the narrow oft-locked room above the Spy-glass tavern. After midnight, when the last of the stragglers have been kicked back out onto the cobblestones and the front door is bolted, she mounts the stairs with candle in hand and turns the key in the bedroom door and then closes it behind her, listening only briefly for the soft sound of his snoring down below. He has taught himself to fall asleep in chairs, hunched over stained tables or leaning back against the wall, his crutch propped out in front of him, sticking like a long, silent bone out of the shadows.

A part of Madi minds this; a part of her doesn’t. At night she spreads out her limbs across the cool linens and tick mattress and stares at the passing glow of the moon across the ceiling until sleep comes to her, and she rarely dreams. She has not slept through a night beside her husband in ten years. She is beginning to forget what it felt like.

As with all things in their marriage it was not discussed; it simply happened, slowly and by increments over time. On particularly cold nights she covers his shoulders with a blanket or a shawl before she goes up, or pries the cup out of his hand or tucks his hair behind his ears, but he is always asleep when she does this, his eyes roving beneath their lids. In the mornings he returns the blanket or the shawl to her, folded neatly, and touches her wrist with his hand, but nothing else is said about it.

The rift has always been there; it widens every year, silently, like the sea floor yawning open beneath their feet.

 

* * *

 

 

When her mother died, when the remains of her camp and her people dispersed like fog through the West Indies and the undergrowth began to creep back over the huts and walkways, he secured them passage from the island to Port Royal, and from there to England. They paid nothing for their berth on either ship; he sweet-talked and charmed and weaseled their way for them, flashing his grin and spinning yarns for their benefit, and Madi watched as if from a great distance. She has picked up on his tricks, and can see now, keenly, the exact moment he lifts the mask up to his face, and the exact moment he drops it again. He still had some vibrancy then, some fleeting sense of hope that things would be better someday, but most of that is gone now.

He gave her three gifts when they landed in Bristol, after a long and awful journey. When his hand found hers on the docks his fingernails were still rimed with dried blood from the scurvy that had plagued them both on board, becalmed halfway through the Atlantic, and it would be a long time after that before she was used to the totality of his missing leg, amputated again at the hip by the ship’s doctor near the Azores.

He married her—that was the first gift: it was quick and without ceremony, in the first church they could find that would do it, with only a few deckhands from the voyage as their witnesses. What full measure of protection it gave her neither of them could say, but the simple ring he gave her she kept polished and bright, and stared down the white men whose gazes lingered too long on her until they turned away.

The second gift was the Spy-glass, a ramshackle inn that he bought at auction, and they have lived here now for fourteen years; what work there is to be done, in selling rooms and rum and ale, are things he busies himself with, and it is only among patrons that she ever hears him laugh. She keeps the books, and sometimes tends the bar or helps in the kitchen, and when he is gone, on the very occasional voyage across the Channel or down the coast, she keeps a quiet inn, turns away the drunkards and the rogues and doesn’t care much for business lost. She stands behind the bar and waits for him to come back.

The third gift he made known to her only by implication—that she was free, at any moment, any day, to leave him, and he would not follow her if she did.

 

* * *

 

 

Madi loves him, and that is her misery. She hates him, too, and the two are at war without ceasing in her breast; the torment, now, after sixteen years together all told, is that it has all dulled, all settled out like water undisturbed.

Once, she took a small amount of money from the chest in the narrow bedroom, and a young white sailor she was acquainted with from another part of the street accompanied her by carriage down the coast a ways, to a house that let rooms to black folk near the sea, and stayed there a week in a cramped room with him. She did not sleep with the sailor; she walked along the rocky shore in her bare feet at all hours, her shawl gripped tightly around her arms, staring off at the vague shapes of Wales across the water, at the lonely expanse of grey, churning ocean that separated her from the far distant tropics.  She ate what she liked and slept fitfully and knew as soon as she stepped foot inside the house that she was going back, back to Bristol, back to him, and when she alighted again outside the Spy-glass and her companion went on his way back home he was waiting for her in the doorway, leaning on the jamb with his crutch loose under his arm.

“You came back,” he said, softly, as she went inside to the cool empty dark of the morning room, and she reached up to straighten his collar and smoothe it down.

“Yes,” she said.

He loves her, and perhaps that is his misery. He loves her desperately, like a drowning man loves the thought of air. He never asks her for anything except, occasionally, her conversation, her opinion; she is his full equal, in profits and in freedom. There are long stretches of good in which they eat together, sit by the fire on lean days and talk for hours, and sometimes he even makes her laugh, tells her a lewd story told to him by someone else, and she doesn’t miss the faint spark in his eyes when she does—as if, for an instant, his heart is soothed completely by the sound of her joy.

It never lasts, though it never ends for any reason, either. A coldness turns in her, and he feels it, and then there are long stretches of silence between them, where he moves around her in wide arcs and touches her only briefly. She knows it is killing him, that if she could only be happy he could be, too; but she cannot bring herself to leave and she cannot bring herself to pretend.

In the good days, the good weeks and months, she can see the fragments of who he’d been once: charming, quick-witted, self-assured and madly in love with her—his potential. She can see it in his bearing and the way he talks with seafarers in the tavern; she can feel it when he brushes past her and rests his hand for a moment on her shoulder. Sometimes she lets him make love to her in the good days, and she tries to feel it too, to latch onto the stinging barbs of love in her heart and ride them through, to kiss him as passionately as he kisses her. Sometimes she even achieves it, and when she takes the moment to look into his eyes and see herself reflected there she could burst for how much she wishes to exist in it forever—kill the past and love him again, simply and totally, without pain.

It is not for lack of trying; it is simply impossible.

Those times are the only times they sleep side by side, and she lies awake to listen to the uneven rhythm of his breath and knows that he is weeping, and does not reach out to comfort him. The cold turns in her again and drives the warmth out from between them and she sinks, helplessly, driven under by the waves.

It is a trembling line she walks—between her unkillable love and her hate for him.

 

 

* * *

 

The parrot is a surprise, and she surprises herself with how much she likes it. For a long time it goes unnamed, a novelty in the tavern, hopping listlessly across the countertop or flying unexpectedly at patrons who duck and squawk. Often it perches on his shoulder, biting at strands of his hair with its curved black beak, and she feels a fondness when she hears him murmuring to it late at night, having veiled conversations with it as he cleans spilled drinks and upturns chairs. It learns words—mostly vulgar—and she grows used to hearing it screech “Halloo, halloo” at her when she descends in the mornings, where he is already up and making things ready for the day.

It likes her, though she shoos it away when it tries to bite her hair. It likes to dig its claws into her arm and blink curiously as she makes lists and marks in her ledger. For a while it is something they share, the parrot—green and yellow and poorly-behaved—its antics make him smile, and sometimes they smile at it together. It was a gift from a boatswain with whom he is acquainted, having returned from South America with dozens of them in swinging cages for rich, bored women and effete young painters to buy for exorbitant sums.

Madi is passing through, upstairs to bed, when she first hears him call the bird _Captain,_ and she pauses on the steps with her shoulder pressed against the corner, listening.

“There’s my girl,” she hears him say, soft and low, and the parrot’s musical answering murmur. “To sleep with us both soon, I think, Captain Flint.”

She closes her eyes and exhales, and then turns and goes up.

In the morning, when he is still asleep in a chair out front, she quietly lets the bird out of its cage and balances it on her fingers, and it looks at her from all angles, ducking and weaving its head and ruffling its wings occasionally.

“Captain Flint,” she murmurs, and the bird opens its beak and she sees it black tongue, pointing out.

“Pieces of eight!” it says.

She is pleased to hear that it doesn’t sound anything like him.

She gently lifts it onto her shoulder, and she lets it nip at her hair.

 

* * *

 

 

“What would make you happy?” he says, his hand drawing down across her face, gentle and warm. “I want to make you happy.”

They are facing one another, sitting up close in the bed they do not share. Between them gooseflesh ripples on their bare skin—it is winter in Bristol and the draft is at the window, and she has been feeling inexplicably sad for days, wanting for the first time in months for him to hold her. She wants to notch her body in against his where they fit, feel his breathing and his heartbeat and remember why she loves him, and she does—more and more the love outweighs the hate but the hate is still there, rocking viciously to and fro in her stomach like some sinister ghost ship in the distance, churning wicked in her gut. She loves him, beyond his sick betrayal—she understands him, why he did it, why he hurt her, and she has long since forgiven him, or told herself she has; but that worm of hate is there, still, cold and cruel. She wants him to pluck it out of her and kill it. She wants him to teach her how he does it—how he loves her despite her chill, despite the way she punishes him every day of her life.

“You make me happy,” she says. It isn’t true. She leans forward to rest her head on his shoulder, and he wraps his arms around her.

“Liar.”

“I want you to make me happy, then. You. I want to be happy about you.” She puts her hands flat on the taut plane of his stomach, above the triangle of coarse black hair and the mutilated flesh of his left hip. “I want.”

She wants it to be easy, like it used to be. She wants to want him without lying to herself. She wants to be his wife.

“I would give you anything,” he says, and his voice is pained. She crushes in closer to him, as if to smash herself to pieces against his body. “If I could.”

In his hair there are strands of grey. She wants to cry. She wants him to stop talking and touch her, warm her. She reaches down for him and takes him in her hand and he jolts a little, as if surprised. His hips rise to her and she wants him to kiss her. Maybe if they lean into this in silence, as long as their skin is touching, the rest of it won’t exist—they will be in the sun on her island, beneath the bare shade of a thatch roof, moving in synchrony while children shout down below and men call names through the trees. Ships will be waiting in the harbor for them. Their endeavors not yet crushed. Her heart not yet crushed.

He cannot lie on top of her so she slips him inside her and slides into his lap, holding his face in her hands, kissing him in desperation, and he holds her like a fragile thing in his big, calloused hands, his breathing hot and fast against her mouth. There is a bewilderment about him and she keeps on pressing closer until she can feel the sweat breaking between them, and she wants wildly to vanish into him. If she were inside him, nestled deep beside his heart, she could begin to make him understand all the things that she means. She could make him feel what she is feeling.

 

 

* * *

 

There is a cold steel glint in his eye and she does not know what it means until he follows her, for the first time in a decade, up the stairs at night, and though she looks at him quizzically he doesn’t say a word until the door is closed behind them.

At first, in the dim light of her candle, he doesn’t move to speak; she looks at him, and waits.

“I’ve been hired on,” he says, slowly, “as a cook.”

“Where to?”

He lifts his eyes to her, and she feels her heart sink, her jaw settle.

“John,” she says, with a fierceness.

His eyelids stutter, and he says nothing else. She stands there, her breath coming faster in her lungs, her heart beginning to race. Up out of her gut crawls her hate, huge and hot, into her throat, her mouth. She wants to scream—to shatter something. A cold, awful part of her knows it was inevitable; the greater part of her rage wants to kick away his crutch and throttle him up against the door, slam his skull into the wood until it smashes open like an egg. There is a weight settling on her shoulders like a hundred oppressive hands, pushing, threatening to topple her to her knees, to knock her over and drag her under.

And then, like a rushing breath, it is gone; she is empty, as suddenly as blinking.

She stands there, wilting on her feet.

“When I come back,” he says, as quietly as she has ever heard him, “if you are gone, I won’t follow you.”

She is reaching inside as far as she dares for the last gasp of her love.

“But if you are here I will be grateful.”

She can feel it, but she cannot find it.

“I have asked you to be impossible things to me,” he says. She can tell by the storm of his face how close he is to breaking. “I won’t ask you for anything more.”

“I want to love you,” she says, ragged, her eyes hot with tears. Beyond them he is a blur. “I have been trying all this time. I have tried with everything in me and you make it so hard. I love you—in spite of myself I love you—you have made it the worst thing in the world.”

He has not looked away from her; for that much he is brave. He does not reach out to touch her, does not move at all. Behind him the door like the wall between the living and the dead. Beyond it he is going backward, hurtling after ghosts, leaving her alone.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and she knows that he means it, can feel it cutting into her bones. She wishes that it mattered. “It’s here now. I don’t know what else to do.”

She closes her eyes, and keeps them closed, even at the sound of the door closing, and the sound of his crutch on the stairs. She stands there, swaying in the dark, her fists clenched at her sides, until she is certain he is gone.

 

 

* * *

 

She collects their money, and she contacts a man of whom she knows and tells him she wishes to sell the Spy-glass for whatever sum he is willing to pay.

Her husband is a week gone by the time it is done, and on her last night in the narrow room she looks down at her sea-chest of dresses and blouses, scarves and shawls, her ledger books and books he bought her, thumbed-through and worn down. In a small cloth bag her notes and coins, enough to buy her passage anywhere—to Europe, to Ireland; down past Gibraltar to Morocco; to the far high wildernesses of the Americas where snow falls. He would not come after her. He would be relieved, even proud, perhaps, that she was finally free of him.

She tries to imagine herself alone, without him. Tries to imagine herself happy in that way. Never to quarrel with him again, or touch him.

Never to hear his voice again.

She tries to imagine herself empty of his love.

She sits down on the bare, stripped bed, her face toward the wall.

In the morning she will hand the keys of the Spy-glass to her man, and walk the cobblestone streets toward the docks with her sea-chest and her little bag of money. She will find an inn near the water, from which she can look out every day; she will pay whatever sum they want from her.

She will wear her wedding ring.

She will wait for him.


End file.
